This is for Hector. May you have finally found peace in the core of your own deep heart. We loved you.
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
-William Butler Yeats
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
On Yoga and Geometry
After 7 years of somewhat sporadic yoga practice, I am finally beginning to understand it on a meditative, as well as a physical level. To see how the practices of the body are linked to the processes of the mind.
In Iyangar, the style of yoga I practice, every pose is a lesson in concentration and adjustment- a tweak of the wrist, or a slight extension of a muscle- each small stretch or twist is a step in the process of reaching the goal of pose completion. A version of many poses (asanas) can be achieved from day one, but most take somewhere between weeks and years to master. Luckily, in yoga, it is the journey of the body and mind that matter, rather than mastery itself.
Although handstand is an asana that doesn’t get covered in every class, when it does, I am always one of the people who needs the instructor’s help to swing my legs completely up over my head. Once I’m in the pose, I can balance quite steadily on my palms, but getting my heels to kick up over my hips of my own volition is something I have failed to do, over and over again.
One thing every instructor has told me though is that failure to complete this inversion is not physical. It is about fear. Fear that your arms won’t support you and your head will crash into the ground, perhaps. Or fear of being upside down, and seeing the world from a different angle. Yet, neither of these are my fear. I can balance on top of my head in headstand quite happily for as long as 4 or 5 minutes, so seeing the world toes-on-top doesn’t bother me. And I know my arms can support me, and do, when I have help getting the legs to go over. No, my fear is about something else entirely.
Every time I fail to do handstand, I think of the line “Where I live, there’s a lady who walks everywhere on her hands, she don’t trust where her feet want to take her” from the Belly song Judas My Heart. This morning was no different. After 20 minutes of kicking upwards and toes ungraciously slamming onto the floor- the lyric trailing in my brain- rather than accepting the standard trepidations as my own, I asked myself what my fear is really about. After all, what is the difference between standing on hands, standing on head, and standing on feet? What do each of these mean on a metaphorical level, and why can I easily do two of them, while the third remains the elusive place I just can’t get?
The metaphor of standing on your own feet is obvious, but if I relate it to the lyric, it implies something more. Not just the ability to stand and support oneself, but to truly be upright, one must also trust that the steps taken and the roads traveled on those feet will lead to places that are just and right. And although it hasn’t always been thus, these days my steps are steady and strong, and in both yoga and in life, I’ve learned to spread my toes a little, making the base of my foot wider, rooting me ever more firmly in place.
And what of the head? What does it mean to stand solidly on the crown? I used to think that to be an expert at something, one had to know and do everything in a particular area. What I’ve learned is that expertise is relative, and that what separates the adept is simply a passion and openness for the learning process. The capacity for wonder, and acceptance of discomfort, these are the markings of the truly able. In my own desire to know I have moved from undergraduate English major, to doctoral level quantitative analysis. I looked both Calculus and Statistics in the eye, and although I was not perfect or even uniquely talented at either of them, I still won. So standing on my head simply means that I have accepted that the world is big, and although I will always strive to know more, everywhere I go, and everything I learn is also already enough (For more on this, see this guest post).
Ah, but then I come to my hands, and my arms, for what do I use these? Hands and arms are for carrying and holding, pulling forward, and release. They are for caress and embrace and for things all together more tender then those that are the purview of the feet and the mind. Arms are the embody of love. And although I can stand on them once I am there, letting the head hang, suspended in air, and letting the feet swing out free to get there, this is where my fear lies. It is in this process of letting go the feet and the head, the moment of ambiguity when the weight is in mid-shift and balance moves from one point to the other, this is the instance where I fail. But why?
They say that the triangle is the strongest shape. Its three points are interdependent, with each side pressing on the vertices to create angles that cannot be bent or pushed out of shape. At the same time, they work in tandem and no one angle can maintain its solidity without the other two. Like triangles, I think that each of us must have three major points upon which we rely for strength, and that these three are different for everyone. For me, the three points of my triangle are my head, my feet, and my hands- in all their figurative meanings. It has taken me a long time to learn how to stand firmly on two of them. But the third, the third is an asana I still have yet to learn. To allow myself to stand on my hands, let my arms do the work of holding me, knowing that the release of the others will not result in collapse of the whole, this is the challenge. And this is the fear. Someday I’ll get there. I’ll find the point where love is in balance with head and feet, and when I do, I know it will be because all of me has swung free, lifted from the ground, and seen the world in a new way.
In Iyangar, the style of yoga I practice, every pose is a lesson in concentration and adjustment- a tweak of the wrist, or a slight extension of a muscle- each small stretch or twist is a step in the process of reaching the goal of pose completion. A version of many poses (asanas) can be achieved from day one, but most take somewhere between weeks and years to master. Luckily, in yoga, it is the journey of the body and mind that matter, rather than mastery itself.
Although handstand is an asana that doesn’t get covered in every class, when it does, I am always one of the people who needs the instructor’s help to swing my legs completely up over my head. Once I’m in the pose, I can balance quite steadily on my palms, but getting my heels to kick up over my hips of my own volition is something I have failed to do, over and over again.
One thing every instructor has told me though is that failure to complete this inversion is not physical. It is about fear. Fear that your arms won’t support you and your head will crash into the ground, perhaps. Or fear of being upside down, and seeing the world from a different angle. Yet, neither of these are my fear. I can balance on top of my head in headstand quite happily for as long as 4 or 5 minutes, so seeing the world toes-on-top doesn’t bother me. And I know my arms can support me, and do, when I have help getting the legs to go over. No, my fear is about something else entirely.
Every time I fail to do handstand, I think of the line “Where I live, there’s a lady who walks everywhere on her hands, she don’t trust where her feet want to take her” from the Belly song Judas My Heart. This morning was no different. After 20 minutes of kicking upwards and toes ungraciously slamming onto the floor- the lyric trailing in my brain- rather than accepting the standard trepidations as my own, I asked myself what my fear is really about. After all, what is the difference between standing on hands, standing on head, and standing on feet? What do each of these mean on a metaphorical level, and why can I easily do two of them, while the third remains the elusive place I just can’t get?
The metaphor of standing on your own feet is obvious, but if I relate it to the lyric, it implies something more. Not just the ability to stand and support oneself, but to truly be upright, one must also trust that the steps taken and the roads traveled on those feet will lead to places that are just and right. And although it hasn’t always been thus, these days my steps are steady and strong, and in both yoga and in life, I’ve learned to spread my toes a little, making the base of my foot wider, rooting me ever more firmly in place.
And what of the head? What does it mean to stand solidly on the crown? I used to think that to be an expert at something, one had to know and do everything in a particular area. What I’ve learned is that expertise is relative, and that what separates the adept is simply a passion and openness for the learning process. The capacity for wonder, and acceptance of discomfort, these are the markings of the truly able. In my own desire to know I have moved from undergraduate English major, to doctoral level quantitative analysis. I looked both Calculus and Statistics in the eye, and although I was not perfect or even uniquely talented at either of them, I still won. So standing on my head simply means that I have accepted that the world is big, and although I will always strive to know more, everywhere I go, and everything I learn is also already enough (For more on this, see this guest post).
Ah, but then I come to my hands, and my arms, for what do I use these? Hands and arms are for carrying and holding, pulling forward, and release. They are for caress and embrace and for things all together more tender then those that are the purview of the feet and the mind. Arms are the embody of love. And although I can stand on them once I am there, letting the head hang, suspended in air, and letting the feet swing out free to get there, this is where my fear lies. It is in this process of letting go the feet and the head, the moment of ambiguity when the weight is in mid-shift and balance moves from one point to the other, this is the instance where I fail. But why?
They say that the triangle is the strongest shape. Its three points are interdependent, with each side pressing on the vertices to create angles that cannot be bent or pushed out of shape. At the same time, they work in tandem and no one angle can maintain its solidity without the other two. Like triangles, I think that each of us must have three major points upon which we rely for strength, and that these three are different for everyone. For me, the three points of my triangle are my head, my feet, and my hands- in all their figurative meanings. It has taken me a long time to learn how to stand firmly on two of them. But the third, the third is an asana I still have yet to learn. To allow myself to stand on my hands, let my arms do the work of holding me, knowing that the release of the others will not result in collapse of the whole, this is the challenge. And this is the fear. Someday I’ll get there. I’ll find the point where love is in balance with head and feet, and when I do, I know it will be because all of me has swung free, lifted from the ground, and seen the world in a new way.
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